EE Times Group launches Embedded Internet Design site

Someday in the future, your refrigerator will conduct an inventory of its contents and send an order to your preferred online grocery. When the store responds with a coupon for your favorite ice cream, the fridge will text you for approval. Although that scenario has not yet arrived, Internet-enabled device-to-device communication is definitely here.

Worldwide, more than 4 billion devices were communicating over networks last year, according to the 2009 IDC Embedded Internet Project. In a few years, there will be more devices connected to the Internet than there are people on the planet and that number is projected to keep growing toward 16 billion by 2015, IDC estimated.

With the launch of a new Web site called Embedded Internet Design, www.embeddedinternetdesign.com, earlier this month, United Business Media's EE Times Group aims to provide resources and networking opportunities for the design engineers creating these cutting-edge technologies. The site specifically targets engineers in the automotive, digital home, industrial control, medical and wireless industries.

Embedded Internet Design is sponsored solely by Intel Corp., but it is editorially independent, said Felicia Hamerman, group marketing director for the EE Times Group.

“It's not like an Intel custom site,” she said. Rather, it follows the model of Internet Evolution, a 2-year-old site within UBM's TechWeb division that is sponsored by IBM Corp.

One of the signatures of the new site will be community interaction, Hamerman said. “We want to start building an engaged conversation among engineers in these verticals through forums and blogs,” she said. “They can ask design-related questions of the broader community, peers whom they trust.” To reflect this emphasis, recent conversation threads from forums are displayed at the center of the home page of the Web site.

David Blaza, VP-events and embedded systems for EE Times Group, noted that the site has an editorial staff with deep industry knowledge to produce high-quality content. “Content is still king,” he said. “They've been doing this a long time, so they know which articles, technical papers and tutorials the engineering community wants.” The topics covered include software, microprocessors, power management and hot new products; much of the information is how-to oriented.

Engineers in this field are hungry for education, Blaza said. “A big part of what we're doing is producing e-learning courses and technical papers so that they can learn how to do the designing.”

This year, EE Times Group plans to introduce a large number of new products and programs. “In spite of the negative news you often hear, we see lots of opportunities for growth, and we are actively going after them,” Blaza said.